Lisa’s Reviews > The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper > Status Update

Poor women’s labour was cheap because poor women were expendable and because society did not designate them as a family’s breadwinner. Unfortunately, many of them had to be. If a husband, father or partner left or died, a working class woman with dependants found it almost impossible to survive. Society was designed to ensure that a woman without a man was superfluous.

They began their lives in deficit. Not only were most of them born into working-class families, but they were born female. Before they had even spoken their first words they were regarded as less important than their brothers and more of a burden in the world than their wealthier female counterparts. Their worth was compromised before they had even attempted to prove it.

As news if her murder spread across the UK and around the globe, not one friend or relation from the past appears to have recognised Mary Jane Kelly’s name or any part of her story enough to have come forward. In subsequent decades attempts to research her history have proven equally fruitless...

By the time Kate had found John Kelly, she had lost the goodwill of most of her family, she had suffered domestic violence and bereavement, and had experienced the degradation of the workhouse, near-starvation and illness. Under such circumstances, what mattered most was the here and the now: acquiring the drink that dulled the pain and the food that stopped the hunger.

Such an attitude was not out of step with Victorian working-class sentiments about domestic violence, which frequently placed the onus for a beating in the woman herself. A certain degree of violence within the home was thought to serve a disciplinary function. Husbands felt no remorse for administering a chastising slap, while wives were often made to feel that they had ‘asked for it’.

[Elizabeth] had been a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mistress, a fraudstress, a cleaner, a coffee-house owner, a servant, a foreigner, and a woman who had at various times sold sex. However, the police and newspapers saw only another victim: an ‘unfortunate’ who resided in a Whitechapel lodging house, a drunk, degenerate, broken-down woman far beyond the blush of youth.

While the methods of enforcing regulation varied between countries, the concept which they all shared was that women in the sex trade should shoulder the blame for the transmission of syphilis. It was believed that if the state could control the morally corrupt fallen woman, the instrument of the disease’s spread, then the problem could be isolated. The male carrier was exempt from regulation.

Although her transgressions may not have been of a sexual nature, Victorian society conflated the broken woman with the fallen woman.

In previous attempts to recount the events of Annie Chapman’s life, one of the greatest oversights has always been a failure to examine how someone who had lived in a country estate in Berkshire or who had resided in Kingsbridge ended up in Whitechapel.

The pension to which George has been entitled would have expired with his death: in the mid-nineteenth century the law did not permit widows to claim on behalf of their deceased husbands. Overnight, the family would be bereft of an income, other than the money that Annie sent home or that her sister Emily may have earned.